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Chapter 3: No Future No Past, Only Life Herenow

Nobody wants to feel that he does not know. If you say that yes, Jesus is enlightened, it will be difficult to prove, almost impossible. Twenty centuries of constant argument have not proved anything. Jesus remains as mysterious, as riddlesome as he was. Twenty centuries of theology, constant argument, elaboration, explanation, analysis, interpretation - nothing has been proved. Jesus remains as mysterious as he ever was - maybe even more so - because he is lost in these explanations.

You cannot prove that Jesus is enlightened, because enlightenment is something beyond the mind. You have to taste it; you cannot talk about it; and when you taste it you become silent. But if you want to say that he is nothing, nobody, you can prove it. That is simply very easy.

So people were saying many things, contradicting, negating, arguing that this man is nothing.

When Jesus came into the coasts of Caesarea Phillipi, he asked his disciples, saying, “Whom do men say that I the son of man, am?”

What are people saying about me?

And they said, “Some say that thou art John the Baptist; some, Elias; and others, Jeremias, or one of the prophets.”

This happens always. People have only one criterion and that is of the past. And a man like Jesus is of the present; he is not from the past. He does not belong to any tradition - he cannot belong. A man like Jesus is a rebellion. He cannot be part of any tradition. But the ordinary human mind has no other criteria. At the most, you can think about the past. You can say, “Maybe he is John the Baptist, or Elias, or Ezekiel or Jeremias, or one of the old, past prophets.” When those prophets were present, you never understood them. You never looked into them, directly and immediately. You never encountered them, because to encounter them is great daring. No other courage is more dangerous than to encounter a man who has known, because he is deathlike; he is an infinite abyss.

If you look into Jeremias or Ezekiel or Elias, you are looking into a bottomless abyss. You will start shaking and trembling; you will start perspiring, and you will be afraid. One step, and you can be lost forever, and you cannot come back again.

Jesus, Buddha, and Krishna, they are absolute emptinesses. Their ego has disappeared. They are just vast spaces of being - no boundaries, no maps. The territory is uncharted. Look into it and you will lose your balance. The very earth below your feet will disappear. You will find yourself falling and falling and falling - and the falling is endless.